Bloatware: What is it?

Bloatware wasn’t invented with the Android phone, but Android phone manufacturers and cell phone carriers have really taken advantage of it. Bloatware is all of the extra software applications that come pre-installed on your Android (in addition to vanilla Android)–it can include any kind of application but some of the most notable examples are carrier apps and/or trial apps that you have to pay for after a certain time to keep using it. At best these apps can simply be taking up space on your phone, or at worst it can be running in the background without your knowledge and drain your battery. »

In what seems like a “Finally!” moment, Samsung now allows you to disable the stock bloatware apps that come with its flagship Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. While its not as good as being able to delete and get rid of the apps completely, disabling them means that they will no clutter up your app drawer/home screen and won’t be using up valuable RAM. Bloatware has been a constant complaint over the years for Samsung phones and it seems that the company has finally given in to popular demand. Disabling apps works in the same way as you would uninstall an app that you might have installed at some point. Follow the steps below to disable default Samsung apps 1. Open your app drawer and tap the EDIT button on the top right – you should see a small “minus” bubble in the top corner of all the apps. 2. Select the app you want to disable and tap DISABLE in the popup menu (you can always enable it later if you change your mind) 3. If the app you want is within a fol... »

Google just introduced the newest iteration of its Android Operating System, Android M, during its 2015 Google I/O keynote. While the keynote mentioned that Android M mainly centered around optimizing the operating system, the update also came with a host of new features. The updates included Google Maps, Google Photos, Android Wear, Google Now, Android Pay, app permissions and a bunch of other smaller updates. Google Maps You could already save offline maps in the Google Maps app, but you could not do a whole lot more if you did not have any service (other than look at the map and scroll around). With Android M however, you can now get searches, reviews and information and turn by turn directions while you are offline. There was an onstage demo to show-off all these features and it seemed to work seamlessly. Google Photos To a lot of people, this could possibly have been the biggest update. Google announced a new Photos app that can auto-backup an unlimited amount videos and photos (p... »

It’s been a long time waiting, but the OnePlus One is finally CyanogenMod 12s. It hasn’t officially arrived yet, but the founder Carl Pei announced on Friday that the update will be rolling out in the next few days, as it “just passed certification” according to Pei. Although the OnePlus One already has a Lollipop variant of its own in OxygenOS, CM 12S is expected to give it a fresh variant to CM fans. However, CM 12S is said to maintain most of the original features of the OnePlus One, will come with definite advantages like optimized software, battery life and overall lack of bloatware. »

Samsung just announced its latest flagships, the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge, to much acclaim at World Mobile Congress 2015. In a change of pace, Samsung seems to have put design first for the new Galaxy line – continuing its use of premium materials like metal and glass form its Galaxy Alpha series. The S6 features an aluminum chassis with Gorilla Glass 4 on the front and the back. Along with its streamlining of physical features, they have also cut down on its customization of TouchWiz. Samsung have commented on the new Lollipop TouchWiz as being cut down and lighter on system resources – claiming that there are 40 precent less features on the S6 than there was on the S5. Overall, TouchWiz looks much the same, since most people would just hide the unwanted bloatware in the app drawer anyway, but hopefully the trimming down of features will help with battery life and improve lag. The new TouchWiz is based on Android Lollipop and retains the notifications and crisp ani... »

Google announced on Feb 4 that the Android One program is expanding to a 5th country – Indonesia – after successful launches in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Google’s partnership with local manufacturers to build optimized devices that are able to run Android has seen a fairly warm reception so far. However, arguably the bigger news is that these newer devices will be shipping with Android 5.1 Lollipop, coming after Android 5.0 launched in November 2014. It is not known exactly when Google will start pushing the update to current devices, but it does not look like a major release, so it might be over the next few weeks. The unofficial changelog from Android Pit lists the following improvements: Silent mode added General improvements for system stability Improved RAM management Improved battery management Fixes for crashing apps Fixed issues with wireless connections Fixed problems with OK Google functions Fixed problems with Notifications Fixed sounds proble... »

Cyanogen, the popular developer of Android ROMS, has announced official support for Android One devices. The budget handsets now have official support for CM 11 builds based on Android KitKat 4.4 with an official update to Lollipop based CM12 being actively developed. There have been unofficial ports of CM11 for Android One devices since October 2014, but the ports often had some major bugs, some of which prevented users from using cellular data and the dual-SIM slots. Those issues have since been fixed, but it is always a welcome sign to have official support. This CM11 release should work for all Android One devices, since they all use very similar hardware, Cyanogen has released a unified ROM for all devices. The Cyanogen team mentioned this in their release: This release represents a few firsts for us. Not only are these the first Android One devices and first official release of CM for these devices, the Android One device is the first ever officially supported Mediatek device. Me... »